the Old South Leaflets. Of the first five pieces, here reprinted, "The Editors to the Reader" was written by Emerson, "A Short Essay on Critics" by Margaret Fuller, "To the Aurora Borealis" by C. P. Cranch, "Notes from the Journal of a Scholar” by Emerson's brother Charles, and "The Religion of Beauty" by John S. Dwight.

1903

MR. EMERSON'S VISITS TO ENGLAND IN 1833, 1847-48, AND

1872-73.

It was in the month of August, 1833,- nearly fifty years ago, - that I had the singular good fortune to make the acquaintance of Mr. Emerson, and to enjoy the privilege of several days' intercourse with him. I was then residing in Edinburgh, my native city, and he was on his way home, after his first visit to Europe. He had with him a letter of introduction to a friend of mine, who, luckily for me, was then so much engaged in professional duties that he was unable to spare even a few hours to do the honors of the old Scottish metropolis, so the young American traveller was handed over to me, and I thus became "an entertainer of angels unawares." In those early days Mr. Emerson was about thirty years of age, and his name was then utterly unknown in the world of letters; for the period to which I refer was anterior, by several years, to his delivery of those remarkable addresses which took by surprise the most thoughtful of his countrymen, as well as of cultivated English readers. Neither had he published any of those essays which afterwards stamped him as the most original thinker America had produced. At that time he was still connected with the Unitarian body in New England, although not in full agreement with it on certain matters of doctrine. On Sunday, the 18th of August, 1833, I heard him deliver a discourse in the Unitarian Chapel, Young Street, Edinburgh, and I remember distinctly the effect which he produced on his hearers. It is almost needless to say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of them did not know what to make of

it. The originality of his thoughts, and the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers, whose force, and energy, and vehement but rather turgid eloquence carried, for the moment, all before them, his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of Chalmers. His voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard; nothing like it have I listened to since.

That music in our hearts we bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

We visited together the courts of law and other places of interest to a stranger, and ascended Blackford Hill, which commands a fine view of the city from the south. There were thus good opportunities for conversation. He spoke on many

subjects connected with life, society, and literature, and with an affluence of thought and fulness of knowledge which surprised and delighted me. I had never before met with any one of so fine and varied culture and with such frank sincerity of speech. There was a graciousness and kind encouragement, too, in his manner, inexpressibly winning to one so much younger than himself; and it was with a feeling almost akin to reverence that I listened to and drank in his high thoughts and ripe wisdom. A refined and delicate courtesy, a kind of spiritual hospitality, so to speak,— the like of which, or anything approaching to which, I have never encountered,― seemed to be a part of his very nature, and inseparable from his "daily walk and conversation." It was not therefore extraordinary rather quite a natural result that the impression produced on me was intense and powerful.

It is with a feeling of something like pride that I find recorded, in a journal kept at the time, some memoranda of that brief intercourse, written in a strain of youthful, enthusiastic admiration, and of perfectly confident expectancy as to his future, a strain which might at that time have sounded very

inflated, but which his subsequent career may be said to have rendered almost tame and inadequate. He spoke much about Coleridge, whom he had just visited at Highgate. I happened then to be reading the prose works of that writer, and these formed a fruitful topic of conversation. He spoke of his Friend" and "Biographia Literaria" as containing many admirable passages for young thinkers, many valuable advices regarding the pursuit of truth and the right methods to be adopted in its investigation, and the importance of having precise and correct notions on moral and intellectual subjects. He considered that there were single sentences in these two works which embodied clearer ideas of some of the most subtle of human speculations than are to be met with in the pages of any other thinker. "Let no one however, expect in these books of Coleridge's anything strictly symmetrical. The works themselves are disjointed, inconsecutive, and totally destitute of all regularity and plan. As Hazlitt, with his usual acuteness, truly said of them, 'They are vast prefaces and projects preliminary to immense productions which he was always contemplating, but could never bring himself to execute.' He spoke of Dr. Channing, Sir James Mackintosh, Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," and Charles Cotton's translation of Montaigne's "Essays," which he regarded as matchless among translations. "After reading Cotton's racy English," he said, "Montaigne seems to lose if you look into him in the original old French."

I find that in an essay on " Books" published in 1860 he says that he prefers reading the ancients in translation. It was a tenet of Goethe's that whatever is really valuable in any work is translatable. "I should as soon think," says he, "of swimming across Charles River when I want to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue." After Bohn's volumes of translations of the classics made their appearance, he held that they had done for literature what railroads have done for international intercourse.

Some of Walter Savage Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" he greatly admired, particularly those between Bacon and Richard Hooker, Sir Isaac Newton and Isaac Barrow, and Diogenes and Plato. Although not an admirer of the Utilitarian philosophy, he had some of Jeremy Bentham's hair and a scrap of his handwriting. He asked me if I was in the habit. of writing down my thoughts. I said I was not; that reading

was my greatest pleasure and solace,- laborum dulce lenimen. "I advise you," said he, "and other young men to write down your ideas. I have found my benefit in it. It fixes more firmly in your mind what you know and what you have acquired, and reveals to you unerringly which of your ideas are vague and which solid." Of De Quincey, Wordsworth, and Carlyle he spoke many times, especially Carlyle, of whom he expressed the warmest admiration. Some of his articles in the "Edinburgh Review" and "Foreign Quarterly Review" had much struck him - one particularly entitled "Characteristics" — and the concluding passages of another on German Literature, regarding which he was desirous of speaking to the author. He wished much to meet both Carlyle and Wordsworth: "Am I who have hung over their works in my chamber at home not to see these men in the flesh, and thank them, and interchange some thoughts with them, when I am passing their very doors?" He spoke of their "rich thoughts, and rare, noble glimpses of great truths, their struggles to reveal their deepest inspirations, and glorious hopes of the future of hu manity, not all at once very apparent, but to be digged out, as it were, reverently and patiently from their works."

There was great and, I remember, almost insuperable difficulty in ascertaining where Mr. Carlyle then lived, and I well remember the pains Mr. Emerson took to get the information. At last, it was obtained from the secretary to the University. "I will be sure to send you, before sailing, an account of my visit to Carlyle and Wordsworth, if I should be fortunate enough to see them." Accordingly, in faithful fulfilment of his promise, he wrote me a letter on the goth of August, 1833, from Liverpool, giving an account of the interviews he had with both of them. These interviews he has described in his " English Traits," published twenty-three years afterwards, and must be well known to the readers of that best of all books on England. He found that Carlyle had heard of his purpose to visit him from a friend, and, on his arrival he insisted on dismissing the gig which had been hired to carry him from Dumfries to Craigenputtock,- a distance of sixteen or seventeen miles. It was therefore sent back, to return the next day, in time for him to secure his seat in the evening coach for the south. he spent nearly twenty-four hours with Carlyle and his accomplished wife, who were living in perfect solitude among some desolate hills in the parish of Dunscore,- not a person to speak

So